SBS Tour de France coverage undermined by rogue broadcasts

Madeleine Heffernan

SBS lawyers have been informed that its exclusive coverage of the Tour de France is being undermined by UK coverage being live-streamed into Australia.

Rogue operators are broadcasting the Tour de France coverage of UK broadcaster ITV into Australia. This means the Tour de France is the second major sporting event in as many months broadcast by SBS that has been hit by online piracy.

The first was the World Cup, for which SBS paid an estimated $25 million for two cups. SBS said it had referred a "couple of isolated instances" of online piracy to soccer body FIFA, but "there is no formal investigation being conducted".

SBS has broadcast the Tour de France since 1990 and last year signed a deal to broadcast it until 2023, across television, online and mobile.

An SBS spokeswoman said: “As with any property for which SBS holds exclusive rights, if there were reports of activity that conflict with SBS’s rights for the Tour de France broadcast, SBS would look into it and consider the appropriate action.”

Fairfax Media has previously reported on pirate broadcasts of the World Cup. Set-top boxes sold for hundreds of dollars in Australia provide access to hundreds of channels from predominantly the Middle East and Europe via the internet.

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Illicit websites are also undermining the AFL's record $1.25 billion broadcast deal by showing live streams of matches broadcast by operator Foxtel. Links to the live streams are sometimes available through fan sites and forums. Some streaming sites operate on a subscription model which charges more for better quality feeds.

News Corp and Telstra jointly own Foxtel. Rupert Murdoch, News Corp's executive chairman and chairman and chief executive of entertainment company 21st Century Fox, last week said between 15 and 20 per cent of Fox's revenue is eaten up by illegal downloads.

His companies are lobbying for a crackdown on online piracy, as is film company Village Roadshow.

Graeme Samuel, former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman who now sits on the board of the Australian Rugby League Commission, said: "As a former regulator, and someone who does adhere to the law, piracy is not something to be encouraged. But we find in this area that the prices and the method of selling this content legally acts as an incentive for younger people to acquire it through other sources."

Tony Ishak is managing director of Sydney-based World Media International, which distributes foreign-language TV content. He passed on the information of the Tour de France broadcast to SBS, and is frustrated by the slow political and corporate response to the rising prevalence of pirated content. "I would expect them [SBS] to act on it as a taxpayer-funded organisation," he said.